Editing William Gibson (section)

== Early life ==
[[File:Burroughs1983 cropped.jpg|thumb|upright|right|[[William S. Burroughs]] at his 70th birthday party in 1984. Burroughs, more than any other [[beat generation]] writer, was an important influence on the adolescent Gibson.]]

=== Childhood, itinerance, and adolescence ===
William Ford Gibson was born in the coastal city of [[Conway, South Carolina]], and he spent most of his childhood in [[Wytheville, Virginia]], a small town in the [[Appalachians]] where his parents had been born and raised.<ref name="sourcecode"/><ref name="observer">{{cite news |url=http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/sciencefiction/story/0,,2146989,00.html |title=Space to think |access-date=October 26, 2007 |last=Adams |first=Tim |author2=Emily Stokes |author3=James Flint |date=August 12, 2007 |work=The Observer |location=London |archive-date=October 16, 2007 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071016221155/http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/sciencefiction/story/0,,2146989,00.html |url-status=live }}</ref> His family moved frequently during Gibson's youth owing to his father's position as manager of a large construction company.<ref name="litencyc"/> In [[Norfolk, Virginia]], Gibson attended Pines Elementary School, where the teachers' lack of encouragement for him to read was a cause of dismay for his parents.<ref name=sale>
{{cite news
|url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/passedfailed-william-gibson-novelist-and-scriptwriter-541221.html
|title=Passed/Failed: William Gibson, novelist and scriptwriter
|work=[[The Independent]]
|access-date=March 12, 2009
|date=June 19, 2003
|last=Sale
|first=Jonathan
|publisher=[[Independent News & Media]]
|location=London
}}{{dead link|date=August 2021|bot=medic}}{{cbignore|bot=medic}}
</ref> While Gibson was still a young child,{{efn|1=''[[The New York Times Magazine]]''<ref name="nytmag1"/> and Gibson himself<ref name="sourcecode"/> report his age at the time of his father's death to be six years old, while Gibson scholar Tatiani Rapatzikou claims in ''[[The Literary Encyclopedia]]'' that he was eight years old.<ref name="litencyc"/>}} a little over a year into his stay at Pines Elementary,<ref name=sale/> his father choked to death in a restaurant while on a business trip.<ref name="sourcecode"/> His mother, unable to tell William the bad news, had someone else inform him of the death.<ref name="nytmag1">{{cite news
 | last = Solomon
 | first = Deborah
 | title = Questions for William Gibson: Back From the Future
 | page = 13
 | work = [[The New York Times Magazine]]
 | date = August 19, 2007
| url = https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/magazine/19wwln-q4-t.html
 | access-date = October 13, 2007
| archive-date = May 12, 2013
| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20130512113209/http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/magazine/19wwln-q4-t.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
 | url-status = live
 }}</ref> [[Tom Maddox]] has commented that Gibson "grew up in an America as disturbing and surreal as anything [[J. G. Ballard]] ever dreamed".<ref name="Virus 23">{{cite web
 |url=http://www.dthomasmaddox.com/virus23.html
 |title=Maddox on Gibson
 |access-date=October 26, 2007
|last=Maddox
 |first=Tom
 |author-link=Tom Maddox
 |year=1989
 |quote=This story originally appeared in a Canadian 'zine, Virus '''23''', 1989.
 |url-status=dead
 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071013205424/http://dthomasmaddox.com/virus23.html
 |archive-date=October 13, 2007
}}</ref>

{{Quote box|align=left|width=40%|Loss is not without its curious advantages for the artist. Major traumatic breaks are pretty common in the biographies of artists I respect.|salign=right|source=—William Gibson, interview with ''[[The New York Times Magazine]]'', August 19, 2007<ref name="nytmag1"/>}}

A few days after the death of his father, Gibson and his mother moved back from Norfolk to Wytheville.<ref name="observer"/><ref name="nomaps">{{cite AV media |people= [[Mark Neale]] (director), William Gibson (subject) |title=[[No Maps for These Territories]] |location = New York, NY | publisher=Docurama |medium=documentary |date =2000 | time = }}</ref>{{page needed|date=April 2025}} Gibson later described Wytheville as "a place where [[modernity]] had arrived to some extent but was deeply distrusted" and credits the beginnings of his relationship with science fiction, his "native literary culture",<ref name="nomaps"/>{{page needed|date=April 2025}}{{Verify source|date=January 2025}} with the subsequent feeling of abrupt exile.<ref name="sourcecode">{{cite web
|last =Gibson
|first =William
|date =November 6, 2002
|url =http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/source/source.asp
|title =Since 1948
|access-date =November 4, 2007
|archive-url =https://web.archive.org/web/20071120193555/http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/source/source.asp
|archive-date =November 20, 2007
}}</ref> At the age of 12, Gibson "wanted nothing more than to be a science fiction writer".<ref name=newscientist>{{cite journal|journal=[[New Scientist]]|access-date=November 17, 2008|title=Sci-fi special: William Gibson|first=William|last=Gibson|date=November 12, 2008|url=https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026821.600-scifi-special-william-gibson.html|archive-date=November 21, 2008|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081121072258/http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026821.600-scifi-special-william-gibson.html|url-status=live}}</ref> He spent a few unproductive years at basketball-obsessed George Wythe High School, a time spent largely in his room listening to records and reading books.<ref name=sale/> At 13, unbeknownst to his mother, he purchased an anthology of [[Beat generation]] writing, thereby gaining exposure to the writings of [[Allen Ginsberg]], [[Jack Kerouac]], and [[William S. Burroughs]];<ref>{{Cite book |last=Christophe Becker (under the direction of Noëlle Batt) |url=https://hal.science/tel-03777596v1/file/C.%20Becker.%20Th%C3%A8se%20%28pdf%29.pdf |title=L'influence de William S. Burroughs dans l'oeuvre de William Gibson et de Genesis P-Orridge (The influence of William S. Burroughs in the work of William Gibson and Genesis P-Orridge) |year=2010 |type=doctoral thesis |access-date=February 26, 2025}}</ref> the lattermost had a particularly pronounced effect, greatly altering Gibson's notions of the possibilities of science fiction literature.<ref name="god's little toys">{{cite journal|url=https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.07/gibson.html|title=God's Little Toys: Confessions of a cut & paste artist|last=Gibson|first=William|date=July 2005|journal=[[Wired.com]]|access-date=November 4, 2007|archive-date=February 21, 2007|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070221101831/http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.07/gibson.html|url-status=live}}</ref><ref name="project cyberpunk interview">{{cite book | last = McCaffery | first = Larry | author-link = Larry McCaffery | title = Storming the Reality Studio: a casebook of cyberpunk and postmodern science fiction | access-date = November 5, 2007 | publisher = [[Duke University Press]] | location = [[Durham, North Carolina]] | isbn = 978-0-8223-1168-3 | oclc = 23384573 | pages = 263–285 | chapter = An Interview with William Gibson | chapter-url = http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/gibson_interview.html | year = 1991 | title-link = science fiction | archive-date = January 25, 2012 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20120125090151/http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/gibson_interview.html | url-status = live }}</ref>

A shy, ungainly teenager, Gibson grew up in a monoculture he found "highly problematic",<ref name=newscientist/> consciously rejected religion and took refuge in reading science fiction as well as writers such as Burroughs and [[Henry Miller]].<ref name="nomaps"/>{{page needed|date=April 2025}}<ref name="seattle pi">{{cite news |first=John |last=Marshall |title=William Gibson's new novel asks, is the truth stranger than science fiction today? |url=http://www.seattlepi.com/books/107368_gibson06.shtml |department=Books |work=[[Seattle Post-Intelligencer]] |date=February 6, 2003 |access-date=November 3, 2007 |archive-date=April 19, 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210419035408/https://www.seattlepi.com/ae/books/article/William-Gibson-s-new-novel-asks-is-the-truth-1106809.php |url-status=live }}</ref> Becoming frustrated with his poor academic performance, Gibson's mother threatened to send him to a boarding school; to her surprise, he reacted enthusiastically.<ref name=sale/> Unable to afford his preferred choice of Southern California, his then "chronically anxious and [[clinical depression|depressive]]" mother, who had remained in Wytheville since the death of her husband, sent him to Southern Arizona School for Boys in Tucson.<ref name="sourcecode"/><ref name="observer"/><ref name="nomaps"/>{{page needed|date=April 2025}} He resented the structure of the private boarding school but was in retrospect grateful for its forcing him to engage socially.<ref name=sale/>

=== Draft-dodging, exile, and counterculture ===
[[File:Uncle Gibby.jpg|thumb|upright|Gibson at a 2007 reading of ''[[Spook Country]]'' in [[Victoria, British Columbia]]. Since "[[The Winter Market]]" (1985), commissioned by ''[[Vancouver Magazine]]'' with the stipulation that it be set in the city, Gibson actively avoided using his adopted home as a setting until ''Spook Country''.<ref name="vancouver">{{cite news|first=Joe |last=Wiebe |title=Writing Vancouver |url=http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/arts/story.html?id=99d2236b-c329-4969-b07e-6ffebeff5871 |work=[[The Vancouver Sun]] |date=October 13, 2007 |access-date=March 4, 2017 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121022231428/http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/arts/story.html?id=99d2236b-c329-4969-b07e-6ffebeff5871 |archive-date=October 22, 2012 }}</ref>]]
After his mother's death when he was 18,<ref name=sale/>{{Verify source|date=January 2025}} Gibson left school without graduating and became very isolated for a long time, traveling to California and Europe, and immersing himself in the [[counterculture]].<ref name="observer"/><ref name="nomaps"/>{{page needed|date=April 2025}}{{Verify source|date=January 2025}}<ref name="seattle pi"/> In 1967, he elected to move to Canada in order "to [[Draft dodger#Vietnam War|avoid the Vietnam war draft]]".<ref name=sourcecode/><ref name="nomaps"/>{{page needed|date=April 2025}} Gibson has observed that he "did not literally evade the draft, as they never bothered drafting me";<ref name=sourcecode /> In the biographical documentary ''[[No Maps for These Territories]]'' (2000), Gibson said that his decision was motivated less by [[conscientious objection]] than by a desire to "sleep with hippie chicks" and indulge in [[hashish]].<ref name="nomaps"/>{{page needed|date=April 2025}}{{Verify source|date=January 2025}} He elaborated on the topic in a 2008 interview:

{{blockquote|When I started out as a writer I took credit for draft evasion where I shouldn't have. I washed up in Canada with some vague idea of evading the draft but then I was never drafted so I never had to make the call. I don't know what I would have done if I'd really been drafted. I wasn't a tightly wrapped package at that time. If somebody had drafted me I might have wept and gone. I wouldn't have liked it of course.|source=William Gibson, interview with ''[[io9]]'', June 10, 2008<ref>{{cite interview |last=Gibson |first=William |interviewer=[[Annalee Newitz]] |title=William Gibson Talks to io9 About Canada, Draft Dodging, and Godzilla |location=[[San Francisco]] |date=June 10, 2008 |work=[[io9]] |url=http://io9.com/5015137/william-gibson-talks-to-io9-about-canada-draft-dodging-and-godzilla |access-date=June 10, 2008 |archive-date=June 11, 2008 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080611081540/http://io9.com/5015137/william-gibson-talks-to-io9-about-canada-draft-dodging-and-godzilla |url-status=live }}</ref>}}

After weeks of nominal homelessness, Gibson was hired as the manager of Toronto's first [[head shop]], a retailer of drug paraphernalia.<ref name=desertisland>{{cite episode |title=William Gibson |url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/desert-island-discs/castaway/3ade8915#p00941v7 |access-date=June 27, 2011 |series=Desert Island Discs |series-link=Desert Island Discs |network=BBC |station=[[BBC Radio 4]] |airdate=November 19, 1999 |time=16:41 |quote="For a couple of weeks I was essentially homeless, although it was such a delightful, floating, pleasant period that it now seems strange to me to think that I was in fact homeless. I was eventually, well, actually in quite short order taken on as the manager of Toronto's first head shop. |archive-date=April 30, 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110430113632/http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/desert-island-discs/castaway/3ade8915#p00941v7 |url-status=live }}</ref> He found the city's émigré community of American draft dodgers unbearable owing to the prevalence of clinical depression, suicide, and hardcore substance abuse.<ref name="nomaps"/>{{page needed|date=April 2025}} He appeared, during the [[Summer of Love]] of 1967, in a [[Canadian Broadcasting Corporation|CBC]] newsreel item about hippie [[subculture]] in [[Yorkville, Toronto]],<ref>{{cite AV media|url= https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.3202122 |title=Toronto's Yorkville was a hippie haven in 1967 |date =September 4, 1967 |format = 14 min [[Windows Media Video]]; "This is Bill" appears first after 0:45}} {{cite AV media|url= http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-69-1587-10799/life_society/60s/clip11 |title= Rochdale College: Organized anarchy |format = 16 min radio recording [[Windows Media Audio]]; interviews start after 4:11 |publisher=[[CBC.ca]]|location= [[Yorkville, Toronto]] |access-date=February 1, 2008}}</ref> for which he was paid $500—the equivalent of 20 weeks' rent—which financed his later travels.<ref name="cbc yorkville">{{cite web |url=http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2003_05_01_archive.asp#200226493 |title=That CBC Archival Footage |access-date=November 26, 2007 |last=Gibson |first=William |date=May 1, 2003 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071210172818/http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2003_05_01_archive.asp#200226493 |archive-date=December 10, 2007 |url-status=dead }}</ref>

Gibson spent a "brief, riot-torn spell" in [[Washington, D.C.]], where he completed his high school diploma at the age of 21. He spent the rest of the 1960s in [[Toronto]], where he met Vancouverite Deborah Jean Thompson,<ref name="deb">{{cite news |url= https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/may/03/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.williamgibson |title= Profile: William Gibson |first= Steven |last= Poole |date= May 3, 2003 |access-date= April 27, 2010 |work= guardian.co.uk |location= London |archive-date= January 25, 2014 |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20140125042144/http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/may/03/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.williamgibson |url-status= live }}</ref> with whom he subsequently traveled to Europe.<ref name=sourcecode/> Gibson has recounted that they concentrated their travels on European nations with fascist regimes and favorable exchange rates, including spending time on a Greek archipelago and in [[Istanbul]] in 1970,<ref name="obsession"/> as they "couldn't afford to stay anywhere that had anything remotely like hard currency".<ref name="rogers">{{cite web |url= http://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/William_Gibson/rogers_gibson.interview |title=In Same Universe |access-date=November 6, 2007 |first=Mike |last=Rogers |date=October 1, 1993 |publisher=Lysator Sweden Science Fiction Archive |archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20070419180411/http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/english016/gibson/gibson2.int |archive-date=April 19, 2007}}</ref>

The couple married and settled in [[Vancouver]], British Columbia, in 1972, with Gibson looking after their first child while they lived off his wife's teaching salary. During the 1970s, Gibson made a substantial part of his living from scouring [[Salvation Army]] thrift stores for underpriced artifacts he would then up-market to specialist dealers.<ref name="obsession">{{cite magazine |url=https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.01/ebay.html |title=My Obsession |last=Gibson |first=William |access-date=December 2, 2007 |magazine=[[Wired (magazine)|Wired.com]] |volume=7 |date=January 1999 |issue=1 |archive-date=May 13, 2008 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080513141906/http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.01/ebay.html |url-status=live }}</ref> Realizing that it was easier to sustain high college grades, and thus qualify for generous student financial aid, than to work,<ref name="project cyberpunk interview"/> he enrolled at the [[University of British Columbia]] (UBC), earning "a desultory bachelor's degree in English"<ref name="sourcecode"/> in 1977.<ref>{{cite journal
 |date         = March 4, 2004
|title        = UBC Alumni: The First Cyberpunk
 |journal      = UBC Reports
 |volume       = 50
 |issue        = 3
 |url          = http://www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/ubcreports/2004/04mar04/gibson.html
 |access-date  = November 2, 2007
|archive-url  = https://web.archive.org/web/20080108011400/http://www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/ubcreports/2004/04mar04/gibson.html
 |archive-date = January 8, 2008
|url-status   = dead
 |df           = mdy-all
}}</ref> Through studying [[English literature]], he was exposed to a wider range of fiction than he would have read otherwise; something he credits with giving him ideas inaccessible from within the culture of science fiction, including an awareness of [[postmodernity]].<ref name="crier"/> It was at UBC that he attended his first course on science fiction, taught by [[Susan Wood (science fiction)|Susan Wood]], at the end of which he was encouraged to write his first short story, "[[Fragments of a Hologram Rose]]".<ref name="litencyc"/>

=== Early writing and the evolution of cyberpunk ===
After considering pursuing a master's degree on the topic of [[hard science fiction]] novels as [[Fascist (epithet)|fascist]] literature,<ref name="project cyberpunk interview"/> Gibson discontinued writing in the year that followed graduation and, as one critic put it, expanded his collection of punk records.<ref name="calcutt">{{cite book | last = Calcutt | first = Andrew | title = Cult Fiction | publisher = Contemporary Books | location = Chicago | year = 1999 | isbn = 978-0-8092-2506-4 |oclc = 42363052}}</ref> During this period he worked at various jobs, including a three-year stint as teaching assistant on a film history course at his alma mater.<ref name="litencyc"/> Impatient with much of what he saw at a [[science fiction convention]] in Vancouver in 1980 or 1981, Gibson found a kindred spirit in fellow panelist, punk musician and author [[John Shirley]].<ref name="storming">{{cite book | last = McCaffery | first = Larry | title = Storming the Reality Studio: a casebook of cyberpunk and postmodern science fiction | publisher = [[Duke University Press]] | location = [[Durham, North Carolina]] | year = 1991 | isbn = 978-0-8223-1168-3 | oclc = 23384573}}</ref> The two became immediate and lifelong friends. Shirley persuaded Gibson to sell his early short stories and to take writing seriously.<ref name="calcutt"/><ref name="storming"/>

{{Quote box|align=right|width=30%|In 1977, facing first-time parenthood and an absolute lack of enthusiasm for anything like "career," I found myself dusting off my twelve-year-old's interest in science fiction. Simultaneously, weird noises were heard from New York and London. I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign. And I began, then, to write.|salign=right|source=—William Gibson, "Since 1948"<ref name="sourcecode"/>}}

Through Shirley, Gibson came into contact with science fiction authors [[Bruce Sterling]] and [[Lewis Shiner]]; reading Gibson's work, they realized that it was, as Sterling put it, "breakthrough material" and that they needed to "put down our preconceptions and pick up on this guy from Vancouver; this [was] the way forward."<ref name="nomaps"/>{{page needed|date=April 2025}}<ref name="shiner"/> Gibson met Sterling at a science fiction convention in [[Denver]], [[Colorado]], in the autumn of 1981, where he read "[[Burning Chrome]]"&nbsp;– the first cyberspace short story&nbsp;– to an audience of four people, and later stated that Sterling "completely got it".<ref name="nomaps"/>{{page needed|date=April 2025}}

In October 1982, Gibson traveled to Austin, Texas, for [[ArmadilloCon]], at which he appeared with Shirley, Sterling and Shiner on a panel called "Behind the Mirrorshades: A Look at Punk SF", where Shiner noted "the sense of a movement solidified".<ref name="shiner">{{cite book | last = Shiner | first = Lewis |author-link=Lewis Shiner |author2=George Edgar Slusser |author3=Tom Shippey | title = Fiction 2000:Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative | publisher = University of Georgia Press | location = Athens | year = 1992 | chapter=Inside the Movement: Past, Present and Future |isbn = 978-0-8203-1425-9 |oclc = 24953403}}</ref> After a weekend discussing rock and roll, MTV, Japan, fashion, drugs and politics, Gibson left the cadre for Vancouver, declaring half-jokingly that "a new axis has been formed."<ref name="shiner"/> Sterling, Shiner, Shirley and Gibson, along with [[Rudy Rucker]], went on to form the core of the radical [[cyberpunk]] literary movement.<ref>{{cite book
 | last = Bould
 | first = Mark
 | editor = David Seed
 | title = A Companion to Science Fiction
 | url = https://archive.org/details/companiontoscien00seed
 | url-access = limited
 | year = 2005
 | publisher = Blackwell Publishing Professional
 | isbn = 978-1-4051-1218-5
 | oclc = 56924865
 | pages = [https://archive.org/details/companiontoscien00seed/page/n234 217]–218
 | chapter = Cyberpunk
 }}</ref>